Friday, December 19, 2008

On and On and On:

The Endless Wealth of Franz Kafka’s Short Stories

In his
introduction to Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Trial, critic George
Steiner wrote, “The thought that anything fresh could be said of Franz Kafka’s The
Trial is implausible.” In fact, just the opposite is true: The
inexhaustibility of Kafka’s ability to startle anew and to spawn fresh ideas
makes Steiner’s statement itself implausible. As with Shakespeare, each
individual reader brings new insights to Kafka’s works—works so strange and so
perplexing that no single generation or school of thought could encompass all
of their treasures, especially just within one century. As a caveat, however,
Klaus Wagenback wrote that the initial reason he collected the photos and documents contained in his excellent book Franz Kafka: Pictures of a Life
“came from the dissatisfaction [he] felt with the surfeit of Kafka
interpretations whose speculative nature increased in direct proportion to
their authors’ ignorance of the historical, personal, and linguistic circumstances
in which Kafka’s work came into being.” As with Shakespeare, whose works are
also incredibly strange and perplexing, there’s a danger when reading Kafka of
being too influenced by confused commentators. As it’s always helpful to know
at least some of a work’s context—to help you understand its norms, its intentions,
its jokes, and to keep you from being misled by ill-informed interpreters—I
recommend approaching Kafka with a little more extra-textual information than
usual, at least when trying to extrapolate his works’ meanings into our own
world.

That said, it’s still a simple
fact that within their specific artistic parameters Kafka’s works stand on their own as some
of the most brilliant, astonishing, and mystifying works in all of literature—and
that their very mystifying nature is part of their appeal, and even intention.
In a letter to his editor, Kafka wrote that his three stories “The Stoker,”
“The Metamorphosis,” and “The Judgment” belonged together, “both inwardly and
outwardly.” He continued that, “There is an obvious connection between the
three and, even more important, a secret one. . . .” It’s always been the
“secret” connection that’s been the more intriguing to me, as the connection
has remained secret and has continued to fascinate with its endless
possibilities. Readers rarely find fixed answers to anything when reading
Kafka, and in fact one of the most astute comments I’ve ever heard anyone make
about The Trial is when my grandfather said, “Every time I read it I
understand it less.” It’s not that Kafka revels in obscurity—his works are in
fact some of the most lucid and precisely wrought of the twentieth century;
it’s that his polished facades and carapaces are shrouded in the true mystery
of human existence and that he provides us with the great pleasure of pursuing
that mystery within his work.

A brilliant observer of human
nature, but not at all a realistic or traditional observer, it’s through wild
caricature and fantastical invention that Kafka presents humanity to us. In his
most famous story, “The Metamorphosis,” the main character, Gregor Samsa, wakes
up on the first page to find himself transformed into a giant insect. “Samsa”
is of course code for “Kafka”—Salman Rushdie toys with this in his novel The
Satanic Verses by having a character with the last name Chamcha go through
very Samsa-like metamorphoses—and two of Kafka’s other most famous
characters, Josef K. (from The Trial) and K. (from The Castle), are also stand-ins for the author. This works to increase each of the pieces’
paranoid claustrophobia, and as Gregor Samsa struggles to figure out what in
the world to do with the self stuck inside his new body, we as readers struggle
along with him, just as Kafka intends us to do.

For anyone interested in delving
into what Kafka does best, The Complete Stories & Parables contains
the essence of his genius and is probably where you want to start, as well as to
return to. His three unfinished novels, Amerika, The Trial, and The
Castle, are all extraordinary—especially The Trial—and his voluminous
diaries and letters and notebooks are also deeply rewarding, but Kafka was a
perfectionist, and his shorter works are where he was able to bring his visions
to their fullest articulation. Most readers have some familiarity with the
shocking strangeness of “The Metamorphosis” and “In the Penal Colony” and “A
Hunger Artist,” but the wealth and variety and individuality of Kafka’s other
stories often come as a revelation to those who only have a passing notion of
the misused adjective “Kafkaesque.” There are a few themes that occasionally recur
in his stories and novels, and it’s often these themes taken in isolation that
some critics attempt to color the word “Kafkaesque” with, but when encountering
unique story after unique story after unique story in his full collection, it’s
nearly impossible to pin any kind of label onto Kafka or his work.

In “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor,”
a man comes home to his apartment to find two balls bouncing with no impetus
and no end to their movement. In “A Report to an Academy,” a humanized ape
gives an account of his progress from wild animal to civilized citizen. In “The
Burrow,” some sort of creature describes the endless—and endlessly forking—efforts
that he’s made to secure his subterranean labyrinth from the ever-impending
threats that exist outside. His every story is as unique in its form and
approach as it is in its subject matter or theme. Kafka invents the entire
genre anew with each new story, and what’s as amazing as the tales he tells is
that his experiments with form never come across as mere experiments, but rather as
full artistic realizations. Taken one after another, these works are truly
dizzying, and when read with an open mind, each story offers nearly endless
possibilities for interpretation and enjoyment.

Anthony Perkins playing Josef K., from
Orson Welles’ film version of The Trial

The Complete Stories &
Parables begins with two introductory parables, “Before the Law” and “An
Imperial Message,” and these two parables are often considered to be Kafka at
his most essential. “Before the Law” is especially potent, as it’s the
mysterious central fable told in The Trial. Although Kafka was never
able to complete the novel in full, he chose to publish its parable, in which
ultimate truth is unreachable and even the initial doorway toward truth is
impenetrable. This parable alone has spawned many closed critical readings of
Kafka’s central thrust (or central impotence). But unlike the door at the end
of “Before the Law,” Kafka’s books are endlessly open and can lead to nearly
unimaginable rewards. Don’t let any doorkeepers hold you back. Step into these
stories and read on and an and on.

The Inescapable Labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges

As a young
fiction writer I was once talking with a professor about a story that I was
writing about a library, and she immediately knew that I was thinking of the
Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. She said, “There are certain words you
can’t even utter without bringing Borges to mind: library, labyrinth,
infinity—even the word vertiginous.” Another professor read a story of mine and
said, “You’re trapped. Stop reading Kafka and Borges so much.” Her advice:
“Re-read Proust. He’ll set you free.” It was excellent advice, but the
labyrinths of Borges continue to haunt and to draw me back.

Jorge Luis Borges was born Buenos
Aires in 1899, and he received a world-class education in Europe that brought
him into contact with many influential writers and thinkers who by comparison
now exist as mere footnotes to Borges, because what he brought to his learning
was a mind so searching, so curious, and so infinitely agile that he was
seemingly capable of anything. He became a master of who-knows-how-many
languages, and one of my favorite personal stories he tells is how he came to
learn Italian: He slowly read an annotated bilingual edition of the Divine
Comedy on the train to and from work, and when he was finally finished he
found that he could speak Italian fluently. Another favorite anecdote is that
when he met novelist Anthony Burgess they laughed over having the same last name and
then proceeded to converse with each other in Old Norse.

Borges started as a poet and
essayist, and he continued to pursue these forms brilliantly throughout his
life—his essays are in fact some of the best and most illuminating of the
twentieth century—but it’s as a short story writer that he made his most
indelible mark on world literature. His early work, especially his non-fiction,
is tentative at best and tedious at worst and points to a precocity in need of
a direction, but then in the 1940s two things happened that radically altered
his consciousness and approach. One is that he had a near-death experience that
he later brilliantly transformed into the unforgettable story “The South.” The
other thing was that he translated Franz Kafka into Spanish.

The result of his brush with death
was to give him a relentless drive in a direction that he’d never been so
determined to pursue, and the result of translating the intricately strange and
obsessively precise short stories of Kafka was that he discovered the infinite
possibilities that the form afforded him to pour his vast imagination and erudition
into.

His greatest and most groundbreaking
work was Ficciónes (Fictions), which he published in two parts,
in 1944 and 1946. In this mind-boggling collection Borges wrote of endless
libraries, infinite memories, circular time, false histories that supplant real
ones, mimetic writers whose word-for-word re-creations surpass the originality
of original writers, and arcane but profoundly immediate false histories and invented
ideas that are simply stunning in their ability to move the reader. These concepts
and themes and approaches supplied Borges with an inexhaustible groundwork that
he explored over one of the longest and most fertile literary careers of the
twentieth century.

Perhaps his two most celebrated
stories are “The Library of Babel” (from part one of Ficciónes) and
“Funes the Memorious” (from part two). In “The Library of Babel” the narrator
describes his universe: a (perhaps) infinite library whose endlessly
symmetrical rooms are all filled with the same number of books, which all
contain the same number of symbols, but no two books are exactly the same, and
the universe’s librarians search the stacks their entire lives trying to find
meaning to the books and to their existence. “Funes the Memorious” recounts a
narrator’s encounter with a young man whose riding accident results in a memory
so infinite that he can remember not just every leaf on every tree he’s ever
seen, but every time he’s ever thought of or remembered thinking of each leaf.
The young (but seemingly age-old) Funes learns Latin by reading a few borrowed
books, and his mind becomes an inexhaustible repository for all memory. He was
paralyzed by his accident, however, and so he spends his days remembering and
his nights trying to fall asleep, which he can only do by imagining remote
areas that he’s never seen with his own eyes.

These stories are both infinitely
expansive and terrifyingly claustrophobic, and no reader walks away from
Borges’ writing unchanged. His work began being translated into English in the
1960s, and the effect was momentous. Postmodernism seemed to spring almost directly
from Borges—his influence and presence in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
is substantial—and his influence has only multiplied now that most of his work
has been translated. For the serious devotee, Viking published his
Collected Fictions, Selected Non-Fictions, and Selected Poems
around the 100-year anniversary of Borges’ birth. These books are simply
invaluable. I first encountered Borges in the early 1990s, however, in the
collection Labyrinths, and I still think that this is the best place to
start. Although Labyrinths omits the crucial story “The South,” it culls
most of his best fictions, essays, and parables. Be warned, however: Even this
250-page collection will warp your mind forever. And if you’re a fiction
writer, you will have a hard time escaping the event-horizon of Borges’
vertiginous pull.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Facing Huckleberry Finn’s Ironic Mirror:

Heaven, Hell, and Banned Books in America

If there’s one
good thing that arises from the ineradicable virus of humanity’s urge to ban
books, it’s that it constantly keeps the targeted books fresh in the public’s
awareness—unless, of course, a ban somehow becomes effective and permanently
eradicates a book from circulation. It’s impossible to know exactly how many
books or authors were suppressed or purged forever by such tyrannies as the
Inquisition or the Soviet Union, but in a country where the First Amendment is
under constant challenge by a spectrum of forces that includes the fanatic
fringes, well-organized establishments, and even people sworn to uphold the
Amendments enshrined in the Constitution itself, the effect is often happily the
opposite of what these forces intend.

One of the greatest touchstones of
American literature—and of America’s attempt to censor itself—is Mark Twain’s
endlessly challenging and endlessly rewarding 1884 novel The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. Like all great works of literature, this is a novel
that’s always fresh, radically opening and transforming the minds of every generation
(and, more important, every individual) lucky enough to have access to its
deeply reflective American self-portrait. We read this book, and in its mirror
we discover ourselves, and our country, and our world. In addressing the specter of banning books, this novel is often a central focus of debate, and as a result of the dynamic
tension between the competing ideologies of democracy and authoritarianism over this book’s fate, not only does Huckleberry Finn
remain constantly relevant, but so does the question, “Why Huckleberry Finn?”

Perhaps the irony of how efforts to
ban this book have only kept it and its narrator as alive as ever is a
reflection of the book’s contents and characters themselves—as well as a
reflection of the contents of our own characters. In the nearly Shakespearean
play that takes place between Huckleberry and Jim on their boatride down the
Mississippi, the ironies that arise are seemingly endless, and the relativities
of knowledge and truth are held up to the reader to illustrate a world in which
black can be white and up can be down and north can be south. In reflecting on
his conversations with Jim, Huck is often completely confused about what’s true
and what’s not, at turns mocking Jim’s wisdom as folly and praising his folly
as wisdom. There may be some of Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly in how these
ironies illustrate deep truths, and yet it’s only the reader—and not the
characters themselves—who get to comprehend something of the whole truth, which
shows us our own follies as citizens and as human beings.

In perhaps the novel’s key scene,
Huckleberry tears himself apart over how he’d been helping Jim escape from
slavery and tries to figure out what to do now that Jim has been captured. He
thinks to himself, “There was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and if
you’d a done it they’d a learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been
acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.” He tries to come up with
alternatives that will make his pain over Jim’s return to captivity easier to
bear, and he initially decides to write to Miss Watson, Jim’s owner, so that she’ll pay
the reward and Jim won’t be sold to someone else. This decision tears him up
too, though, and when he realizes that he has to help Jim escape, he tears up
his letter to Miss Watson and says, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”

In a 1986 interview, novelist Cynthia
Ozick speaks of the moral imagination and discusses the deep human beauty of
Huckleberry’s decision to go to hell:

“That’s a great religious book,
Huckleberry Finn, because Huckleberry in his innocence calls it hell, but we as
readers know that at that moment, he’s entered the kingdom of heaven. He
doesn’t [know it], because he’s a child of his society. But the wonder of that
book is that we know it. And that book teaches us that. We know something that
Huck Finn doesn’t know, but Mark Twain has put it in our heads so that we know
it even though his character doesn’t. And I would call that a great piece of
liturgical literature . . . because it praises humanity.”

As
children of a slightly altered society, we as readers can see the irony in the
morality at play in this scene. But in a perhaps immoral irony, the people who
have banned this book (or are still trying to ban it) want to use their own
morality as a reason to shield us from the truths that the book illuminates.
Some parents object to having their children read a book with the word “nigger”
in it, but the truth is that ours is a nation built by slave labor, and the
word “nigger” is deeply ingrained into the history of who we are as a people.
Is it the word “nigger” that book-banners object to, or is it that they object
to having us learn the truth that owning “niggers” was for centuries considered
legal and even biblically moral in our country? Do they want us to think that
blacks and whites enjoy an even playing field now and that our very recent (and
very current) racial divides should be forgotten? And do they want to keep us
from observing Huckleberry’s struggle with his society’s ostensible morality—a
struggle that makes us question the veracity of the received moralities of our
own struggling society?I remember first
reading this book as a child and being aghast at the idea that setting a slave
free would mean going to hell. I argued to Huck, “You’re so confused! You don’t
understand at all that it’s slavery that’s the sin!” And of course he was
confused. But so was I. I needed to go through Huck’s full journey to see that
we are a confused people living in a society where heaven can easily be taken
for hell,
and vice-versa. If book-banners were ever to take Huckleberry Finn from us,
perhaps we’d never see the ironies that can come into play when immoral
authorities tell us what leads to heaven and what leads to hell. And perhaps we’d
never truly see ourselves.

Once More into the Breach:

An Inquiry into the Divisive Politics of Book-Banning

During Banned
Books Week this year we are perhaps both lucky and unlucky to have in
Vice-Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin a public figure who allows us to delve
into the methods, ideologies, and public faces of the book-banning mind, as
well as into the varied public reactions to this always controversial issue.
Much has been written and said about what Palin is alleged to have done to ban
books in her hometown, and much of it has been based on misinformation,
conjecture, and personal prejudice and hasn’t been a reflection of research or
disinterested journalistic inquiry. Nearly as problematic is that hot-headed
finger-pointing has taken the place of true reflection and hasn’t opened much room
for serious inquiry into the very divisions that this issue has created, and is
a reflection of.

In the interest of honesty and full
journalistic disclosure, it must be stated that I take a nearly fundamentalist
anti-book-banning stance and am entirely biased on this issue. But that doesn’t
keep me from looking at facts or from trying to examine the deeper issues that
have arisen as a result of the truths and untruths that have been disseminated
about Palin’s past.

The story that’s been spread through
the blogosphere is that in 1996, as mayor of her hometown, Wasilla, Alaska,
Sarah Palin banned or tried to ban a list of ninety-one books from the Wasilla
Public Library, including Gabriel García Màrquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions,
and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Then, according to the story, when the
town’s librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons (now Mary Ellen Baker), refused to
cooperate, Palin either fired her or tried to have her fired.

Pro-Palin bloggers have fired back
to discount the entire story, pointing out that one book on the circulating
list, J.K. Rowling’s Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, wasn’t published until 1998 and that the
list is merely a cut-and paste of a generic list of banned books. Aside from pointing out the
disparity of the Rowling date, almost all pro-Palin blogs provide no other
evidence of the story’s falsehood, but this disparity is evidence enough to
keep many people from looking into the matter further.

The inclusion of Rowling’s book does seem to discount the
list itself—as does the concept of the notably unliterary former beauty queen
even having heard of García Màrquez, Rousseau, or Aristophanes—but what about the rest of
the story?

According to the September 4th, 2008 issue of the Anchorage
Daily News and a December 1996 edition of Wasilli’s hometown newspaper, the
Frontiersman, the facts are as follows:

Before being sworn in in 1996,
mayor-elect Sarah Palin approached librarian Emmons with an inquiry about the
prospect of banning books, which Emmons rejected out of hand. Emmons told the Frontiersman
that after being sworn in, mayor Palin made the same inquiry two more times,
with Emmons refusing to consider the possibility each time. Palin made one of
these inquiries at an October 1996 City Council meeting, and according to one
attendee, housewife Anne Kilkenny, “Sarah [Palin] said to Mary Ellen [Emmons],
‘What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the
collection?’” Kilkenny went on to tell the Frontiersman, “I was shocked.
Mary Ellen sat up straight and said something along the line of, ‘The books in
the Wasilla Library collection were selected on the basis of national selection
criteria for libraries of this size, and I would absolutely resist all efforts
to ban books.’” No specific books were mentioned at the meeting.

The Frontiersman article said
that after being questioned Palin called her inquiries, “rhetorical and simply
part of a policy discussion.”

Then a few months later librarian
Emmons received a letter from Palin telling her that she was going to be fired.
The letter didn’t mention the issue of book-banning and simply cited Palin’s
opinion that Emmons didn’t fully support her. Public support rose up behind Emmons,
who had been a librarian in Wasilli for seven years, and finally Palin
relented. In similar cases, four other public officials received what Palin
called “test of loyalty” letters, including the police chief, the public works
director, the finance director, and the overseer of the city museum. The latter
resigned after Palin eliminated his job. Then in August of 1999, librarian
Emmons resigned her position two months before Palin began her second term as
mayor. No political pressure or hostility from Palin has been cited as the
reason for her decision, and it would only be conjecture on my part to suggest
this or any other cause.

According to the facts, no books
were banned, and no list of any kind was proposed—the list circulating on the
Internet is indeed a cut-and-paste job, but of a specific and accurate list of “Books Banned at One Time or
Another in the United States,” rather than a “generic” one. But
according to a September 2nd, 2008 issue of Time magazine, many people
in Wasilli believed that Palin had polarized the town by bringing “partisan politics and
hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that
had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among
neighbors.”

To combine these other issues
with the issue of book-banning—and with the four “test of loyalty”
letters other than the one sent to librarian Emmons—is perhaps beyond the purview of the About
Classic Literature blog, but reflecting upon the polarized responses to the
book-banning issue is not.

Having a figure like Palin suddenly
thrust into the spotlight has become a hugely divisive issue, and perhaps this
is Presidential hopeful John McCain’s strategy. In dealing with just the issue
of book banning, we’ve seen how Palin’s entry onto the national stage has made
both the left and the right lose sight of things like evidence and research and
has led to simple knee-jerk reaction. As with so many issues, nuanced
examination has given way to simple partisan faith, and like so much of
Presidential politics and debate, shorthand soundbites have taken the place of
the deeper truths that take more time and effort to unfold. It’s an unfortunate
fact that quick, determined responses almost always impact people more than
thoughtful inquiry. As a result, we in the literary and cultural community have
to ask ourselves how we want to approach the issue without furthering the
divide and further alienating ourselves from people who are resolutely on either side of the political aisle,
who will all stop listening after hearing anything that counters their simple
belief. Keeping the reading community as large and as diverse as possible is in
all of our best interests, and in its attempt to keep an even view and to avoid
partisanship, this article can provide no real answers to these problems. It
can only provide the facts, as far as we can know them, and offer the About
Classic Literature blog as a forum for thoughtful discussion.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

In Search of Perfection:

Unfinished Literary Masterpieces

How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!

—Marcel Proust, Time Regained

Whenever people tell me that they’ve never
finished Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, I always reply, “Well, neither
did he.” In fact, Kafka never finished any of his three novels. He was a
consummate perfectionist, but he had very little stamina as a writer, and he
was never able to bring anything longer than “The Metamorphosis” to perfect
consummation. The unfinished states of Amerika, The Trial, and The
Castle have in fact given rise to comical critical conceits treating their
fragmentary texts as somehow complete and forming an independent aesthetic of their own. In
a completely different approach to a text’s lack of completeness, when
discovering that Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was only half
finished, many readers respond with a combination of exasperation and relief:
“Good God! It could have actually been longer?”

Beauvais Cathedral

In
his great study of the Middle Ages, Mont
Saint Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams writes of the unfinished cathedral of Beauvais as perhaps
the pinnacle of what Gothic architecture could have achieved. Although it’s
hard to imagine anything more sublime than Chartres Cathedral, the full plan
for Beauvais, which has resulted in an astonishing stone half-sketch, was
grander and more unified than any of the completed marvels of the Île-de-France. Likewise, many of literature’s greatest and most
ambitious works astound us even in their unfinished state and have stood as
monuments to humanity’s dual nature as infinite imaginers who are also finite
beings bounded by time and space.

Aside
from Shakespeare’s cosmically dense condensations of universal reflection
(being relatively short plays rather than towering epics), Dante’s Divine
Comedy is often considered to be the single greatest example of a literary
work to achieve total perfection within its intended bounds and aesthetic.
Dante finished his lifework in 1320, just a year before he died, and even
though Dante’s life was unenviable in many ways, his great poem stands as a
masterpiece toward which so many subsequent artists aspire.

Dante’s main model (and guide within the
geography of his poem’s first two books) was Vergil, whose magisterial Aeneid
was considered by much of Late Antiquity and by all of the Middle Ages (when the
Greek Homer was lost) to be the finest book of creative literature ever written,
reigning supreme for the 1338 years between his death (19 BCE) and the
completion of the Comedy. Vergil—whose name was conflated with the Latin
word for “virtue” in the Middle Ages and was re-spelled Virgil—worked on his
Roman national epic for the last eleven years of his life, blending together the
story of Aeneas’ mythic founding of Rome with as many of city’s other founding
myths as possible, taking up

A bust of Virgil in Naples

Homer’s depiction of the sack of Troy in the Iliad and aiming its narrative toward
the apotheosis of Vergil’s friend and patron Augustus Caesar. He was unable to
complete the poem to his satisfaction, however, dying just as he was reportedly
setting aside an additional three years to lick it into shape (his revision
method was likened by his peers to the folk belief that bear cubs are born as formless
masses and are then licked into the correct form by their mothers), and on his
deathbed he asked his friends to burn his imperfect manuscript. Kafka made a
similar request to his friend Max Brod, and thankfully for humanity, both of these
(perhaps disingenuous) requests were ignored. What’s fascinating about the Aeneid
is that, as a story, its narrative and vision and scope are almost entirely
realized, and in translation it’s difficult for many readers to tell that it’s
unfinished, but in the original there remain a handful of lines throughout the
poem whose hexameters were either incomplete or contained clearly provisional/stopgap
endings. Unlike in our own time of total poetic freedom, Classical poetry was
simply considered “wrong” if a line didn’t conform to its meter, and beyond
these prosodic concerns, there are in fact dozens of glaring problems with the Aeneid’s imperfectly revised state that
make readers uncertain about many of the poem’s meanings and intentions and overall
thrust.

The Death of Anchises. Engraving from a Germanchildrens’ picture-book version of the Aeneid,by G. J. Lang and G. C. Eimmart, 1688

Vergil worked on the poem piecemeal, and
some of its twelve books are more completely integrated with themselves and
with the overall text than others, and book three—despite the dizzying multitudes
that its lines contain, most memorably its vivid depiction of the horrifying
cyclopes at its close—features a number of especially glaring lacunae that
confuse attentive and inattentive readers alike. On a prosodic level, book
three contains Vergil’s only hexameter whose meaning is incomplete (as opposed
to the full poem’s other half-dozen incomplete lines, which make complete narrative
sense and are only metrically
incomplete), but beyond this missing step, book three’s other holes throw much
of the surrounding books’ seeming seamlessness into serious imbalance. The most
glaringly missing scene in the whole of the Aeneid
is the death of Aeneas’ father, Anchises, which should have been narrated in
book three when the Trojans arrive in Sicily. Vergil refers to this death scene
throughout the poem, but this isn’t the modernist innovation of Ford Maddox
Ford’s novel The Good Soldier, where
the key scene is alluded to again and again and described in fragments
throughout the book but not actually shown; it’s a real, detrimental hole in
the text.

Map from an early copy of the Aeneid

When Aeneas and his crew later return to
Sicily in book five after their time at Carthage in book four, the narrative
describes their reunion with the Sicilian King Acestes as if he were an
established ally that we recognize from the earlier book, but this is in fact
the first time he’s appeared in the poem’s pages, and readers have to assume that
he would have been described if Vergil had finished filling out book three,
which is some fifty lines shorter than the Aeneid’s
second shortest book. Book three also features confusing attempts on Aeneas’
part to build his people’s new city on three different sites, seeming to forget
that the ghost of his dead wife Creusa specifically told him in book two during
the burning of Troy that he would found a second Troy in Hesperia (aka Italy).
At one point in book three, on the island of Delos, the priest-king Anius
prophesies that the Trojans will return to their progenitor Dardanus’ homeland,
which Anchises interprets as Crete, but then in Crete Aeneas dreams that his
household gods tell him that he’s actually destined for Italy, which is
revealed to be a dual homeland for Dardanus. Readers unfamiliar with the Aeneid’s textual problems are simply
baffled about why Aeneas doesn’t remember his wife’s words from book two and
continue single-mindedly on his way to Italy, likening the anxious hero’s
confused stops and starts to Hamlet’s uncertainty about the truth of his mission
and destiny when in fact playgoers already know that the ghost of his father
isn’t just a hallucination but rather a real presence that’s corroborated by
several other characters. Vergil would have presumably reconciled all of these
problems during his three years of revisions, perhaps either making Creusa’s words
in book two more ambiguous, or else eliminating Aeneas’ false starts in
attempting to found a new city over and over again in book three before finally
arriving in his destined Italy.

The Death of Palinarus. Unidentified.

While book three and its surrounding
narrative threads contain the most jarring inconsistencies, several later books
have interesting and often fascinating lapses too. In book five the helmsman
Palinarus’ death at sea is described as being caused by the god of sleep dragging
him down into the water during his watch, but when Aeneas meets Palinarus in
the underworld in book six, the helmsman says that “no god drowned me in open
waters” and describes how some force dragged him and the ship’s rudder over the
water toward Italy, where he was killed by natives. Book seven has another
lapse, where Vergil refers to Anchises as having made the prophecy that the
Trojans would suffer so much hunger in Italy that they’d eat their platters,
while it was actually Celaeno, the leader of the Harpies, who had earlier
(again, in book three) spoken this dire prediction as a curse.

Agreement between Camilla and Turnus,by Francesco de Mura, 1765

The Aeneid’s
main inconsistencies in its second half—Vergil’s self-proclaimed “greater
labor,” dealing with the subject of arms and modeled closely on Homer’s first
book, the Iliad, while the first half
of the Aeneid conversely deals with Aeneas
the man and is loosely modeled on Homer’s sequel, the Odyssey—consist less of dramatic informational lapses than of
questions of focus and stress and characterization. The second half of the Aeneid seems to be much more cleanly
revised than the first, with thrillingly vivid battle scenes interspersed with
deeply empathetic and integrated character and relationship studies that work
together to heighten the reader’s edge-of-the-seat engagement with the poem’s rich
tapestry of themes, but even in this tighter series of books there are odd
imbalances that leave the reader wondering why some of the scenes don’t seem to
be fully aware of the material in all of the others. While the Aeneid’s most empathetic and memorable
book—book four—deals with Dido’s love for Aeneas and pain over losing him, with
echoes from that episode washing over the entire structure of the poem and reverberating
back like waves bouncing off of distant shores, it’s the remarkable
personalities and presences of two of the second half’s female characters that
strike the reader as largely missing from the rest of the narrative. Although the
amazing Amazon-like warrior Camilla is briefly alluded to in books one and
seven, her extraordinary battle sequences in book eleven seem a bit too
isolated from the rest of the poem and feel like they could have been more
substantially foreshadowed and integrated into Vergil’s characterizations of
Aeneas’ Italian enemies. She just seems to show up and disappear so quickly,
without anywhere near enough preparation. Even more dramatically abrupt,
Turnus’ water-nymph sister Juturna flashes through the Aeneid’s final book, colluding with Juno to protect Turnus from
Aeneas (Juturna’s name is a combination of Juno and Turnus), and her intense
devotion to both her brother and Juno calls attention to her stark absence from
the entire rest of the poem. If Turnus’ sister is a demi-god, why isn’t she
more integrated into the text? Her scenes, like Camilla’s, are strikingly
memorable and richly elaborated, with both women’s personalities and desires
given full staging, and so considering Vergil’s gift for both empathy and
subtlety, especially in portraying the female characters Creusa and Dido, it
seems probable that he would have better woven the two woman warriors’
presences into the poem’s narrative thread had he been able to complete his final
revisions.

Nisus and Euryalus,by Jean-Baptiste Roman, 1827

Similarly, while many of the portraits of
the male warriors in the poem’s second half sear themselves into the reader’s
imagination before they get cut down in battle—especially the beloved friends Nisus
and Euryalus, who open up the poem’s most philosophically compelling ideas just
before going on the murderous rampage that ends their lives, contrasted later
by a characterization almost as empathetic as Dido’s (and almost as challenging
for a Roman audience): the Etruscan king Mezentius, whom the reader has long come
to despise but then grows to feel deep compassion for in his last moments,
having seen him suffer over his son’s death—too often the battle scenes instead
tear through body after body without letting the reader grasp the dying characters’
full personalities or importance. On the one hand, perhaps Roman readers would
have had a more rooted understanding of these dying characters than we do
today, our inability to feel their importance merely stemming from our own
distanced ignorance, but on the other hand perhaps these more slashingly
rendered battle scenes are something of a critique of Homer’s constantly
interrupting rehearsals of each dying warrior’s bloodline and history in the Iliad, with each death stopping the
narrative flow to read a bit like the rules of a football game, where for every
minute of play the action stops for several minutes of formulaic busywork.
Vergil’s battle scenes are far more exciting and fluid than Homer’s, but in
their brevity there’s a diminishment of the reader’s access to the emotional
importance of each life and death, as well as to a larger grasp of the poem’s
world, which in Homer is endlessly vast because of how well documented it all
is on the page itself rather than being merely suggested or implied or assumed,
and it’s impossible to say where Vergil would have shifted his poem’s balance
between drama and totality had he survived to finalize his revisions. It’s also
possible that his battle scenes were completed to his liking and are simply
miscalculated in how well they make us feel their power.

These critiques of the Aeneid’s second half may seem like
nitpicking compared to the poem’s other more obvious lacunae, but they strike
the reader as being in marked contrast to the way Vergil seamlessly weaves his
themes and narrative materials together into what now stands as one of the
world’s most silken narrative tapestries. Rolling so many of Rome’s origin
myths into one dazzlingly entertaining and integrated package, Vergil pulls off
one of literature’s greatest balancing acts as he reconciles the needs of so
many competing narrative and political pressures, reaching such a remarkable
degree of poetic concord that his instances of imperfect harmony seem totally
weird and glaring to us. Thankfully, his final work’s positive achievements
weren’t discarded along with its flaws, leaving posterity with a lustrous,
near-perfect work of art that adds an incalculable amount of richness to the
way we envision and experience and explain ourselves as human beings.

An illumination from The Romance of the Rose

A fascinating and very different example
of an unfinished masterpiece is the medieval epic The Romance of the Rose.
The first 4,058 lines of this allegorical love poem were written by Guillaume
de Lorris, who died in 1237. An anonymous writer added sixty-one lines to
“complete” the poem, but then half a century later Jean de Meun added an
astounding 17,622 lines to make the poem into a true romantic epic. This of course
raises the question of whose poem this really is. Many prefer de Lorris’ more
focused courtly approach, while many others prefer de Meun’s more expansive
philosophical scope. Clearly de Meun makes the totality of the poem his own,
but as we’re left with a very unusual and uniquely beautiful two-stage
cathedral-poem built in widely different styles, perhaps we don’t really need
to decide who it really “belongs to,” but rather to think of it as two
interrelated testaments to the art of courtly and philosophical love. Similarly,
Chartres Cathedral has a Romanesque foundation, and one of its two towers is
considered to be the purest of all Romanesque structures, but a fire in 1194 inspired
the master builders to revise and expand the cathedral’s plan in the new Gothic
style, resulting in lines in the overall structure that don’t harmonize with each other, the unrevisability
of the stone foundation keeping it forever out of sync with the rest of the
design: a kind of stone harbinger of de Lorris/de Meun’s lopsided paper rose later
in the century.

An illumination from The Canterbury Tales

Perhaps the most famously incomplete
literary masterwork is Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, whose
various parts were composed off and on for more than a decade and left in
almost complete disorder upon the poet’s death in 1400. The collection is meant
to encompass tales told by somewhere between twenty-nine and thirty-one
pilgrims on their way to and from St. Thomas à Becket’s shrine at Canterbury.
Each pilgrim is supposed to tell one tale on the way to Canterbury and one on
the way back, but only twenty-four tales were written, and they’re often in
different forms—some are in prose, and many are in verses of different meter.
The geography and order of the tales are often confused, and most of the actual
tales themselves haven’t been reconciled at all with the plan in the poem’s General Prologue. The vivid writing and the deep penetration into human
nature that the enormous incomplete mass contains have left an indelible imprint
on the world’s collective literary mind, however. Having innovated character
writing in a way that paved the way for Shakespeare’s infinitely shaded troupe, Chaucer has
given us something far more valuable than mere perfection.

Like all English writers of the
Renaissance, Edmund Spenser idolized Chaucer, and the case of Spenser’s The
Faerie Queene follows a pattern somewhat similar to that of The Canterbury Tales, although its appeal and purpose and
level of finish are very different. Reflecting much of the renewed Classical learning of
the time—but lacking in Chaucer’s wit and variety, which only Shakespeare was
to surpass—The
Faerie Queenewas conceived as a twelve-book allegorical tribute to Queen Elizabeth, but only six of its books
were ever completed. Spenser began the massive epic in 1579, and he published Books I–III in 1590 and Books IV–VI in 1596, but he died in 1599, and only
fragments of Book VII have been discovered. Like The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene doesn’t conform to the scheme described in its introduction, and it’s
unclear how Spenser would have resolved or reconciled the poem’s parts if he’d
been able to finish and revise the entire work. John Milton claimed
to hold The Faerie Queene as his great source in English literature, but
this is generally viewed as self-crowning praise (because Milton vastly
surpassed Spenser) and as a jealous snub against Shakespeare (who didn’t write
epic poetry), but even though there are great treasures in Spenser’s work that
have inspired centuries of writers, for most readers the labor of finishing
this unfinished epic is rarely one of love.

The
most unusual of all uncompleted literary masterpieces—in terms of both subject
matter and textual history—is certainly the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of
Sodom. De Sade was one of seven prisoners incarcerated in the Bastille at
the beginning of the French Revolution, and although he was moved elsewhere ten
days before what became known as Bastille Day (July 14, 1789), his
manuscripts and belongings lay behind in the tower-prison and vanished when the
Bastille was stormed, looted, and eventually destroyed. Many valuable
manuscripts were lost, seemingly forever, but the one that de Sade considered
to be his masterpiece—120 Days of Sodom—was the one that caused him to
shed “tears of blood.” The manuscript describes the first thirty days of a
ruthless and endlessly blasphemous libertine orgy of sex and violence, with
notes outlining the following extremely well-organized ninety days. The thirty
fully composed days make up a meticulously and gorgeously cruel progression
through “the 150 simple passions,” while the notes sketch out “the 150 complex
passions,” “the 150 criminal passions,” and “the 150 murderous passions” that
were to complete the book. The extant “simple” passions alone are beyond
shocking and force the reader to imagine the unimaginable and challenge the
reader to consider that these words are simply words on a page and to suspend
morality or judgment and simply read this work of literary terrorism.
The manuscript was never publicly recovered during de Sade’s lifetime, and he
spent the rest of his life and career lamenting his lost work while expanding
his style and themes but never again recovering the sheer fury of his nearly
inconceivable lost masterpiece. Luckily for us—or unluckily, depending on your
point of view—the microscopically composed scroll was seized and saved during
the storming of the Bastille, was passed to a family that saved it for three
generations, and was then sold to a German collector named Dr. Iwan Bloch, who
in 1904 published an altered and pseudonymous version of the text because of
its “scientific importance.” After Dr. Bloch died, Maurice Heine acquired the
manuscript in 1929 and subsequently published it in an authoritative edition
under de Sade’s name, thus returning the unfinished masterpiece to its rightful
author after nearly one hundred and fifty years. What’s nearly as amazing as
the contents of the manuscript and notes for the unfinished book, however, is
the author’s extremely astute list of “Mistakes I Have Made,” proving that de
Sade had full mastery of his uncompleted work and that he knew how to make its
horrifying contents even more effectively horrifying. Anyone who’s read this
astonishing work can only marvel (and shudder) to imagine what it could
have been.

In
the twentieth century, two of the most exemplary (but very different) writers
of the age—Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust—also both have famously unfinished
masterpieces. Kafka’s completed short stories are perhaps the most perfect and
resonant of our time, and even his fragmentary tales and parables and sketches
offer endless riches, but he was never able to complete any of his three
novels. Of the three, his second, The Trial, is clearly the standout
masterpiece, but his first, Amerika, is hilariously strange, and his
third, The Castle, takes the author’s labyrinthine method to its
farthest extreme. The incomplete quests dramatized in these fragmentary works
are often taken as reflections of our fragmentary times, and many critics read
these novels’ unfinished stories as parables of the impossibility of attaining
truth or personal autonomy in a world of bureaucracies and tyrannies. These
readings often more reflect the critics’ circumscribed minds, however, because
even though Kafka was frequently quite frustrated as an artist, it’s important
for readers to remember that his final plan for The Castle included
having his protagonist, K, attain his goal of finding access, meaning, and
resolution within the seemingly impenetrable castle. Many critics ignore this
fact, choosing to focus on the futility illustrated in these novels, and there
is much to be learned in these kinds of readings, but as Hamlet says, “there
are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in [this kind of]
philosophy.”

Marcel
Proust is often held alongside Kafka as the writer who most deeply reflected
the lives and minds of modern humanity, but the style and approach of his (just
barely) unfinished masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, could hardly be
more different. Although both writers address the frustrations of the outer and
inner worlds that often confound the yearnings of the heart, mind, and soul,
Proust eschewed the varied narrative approaches of the short-story writer—and
even of the normal writer of separate or even sequential novels—and put
everything he had into his one prismatic and all-encompassing mega-novel.
Casting a wider and deeper net than that in any single creative work in
history, Proust developed a vehicle in his 4,300-page novel that eclipsed the
full scope of Dante’s Comedy and even rivaled Shakespeare in his
endlessly swirling and metamorphosing cast of fully realized human characters.
Proust’s novel is the true human comedy, and with the possible exception of St.
Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica (an unfinished masterpiece of an
entirely different kind), In Search of Lost Time addresses more aspects
of our existence than perhaps any other single piece of human writing. Like
Aquinas’ Summa and Dante’s Comedy, Proust’s work is a construction
that must be experienced from beginning to end, its progression of parts rising
to a cathedral-like majesty as it builds toward its culmination. It’s an
imperfectly completed cathedral, of course, as Proust’s death in 1922 halted his
endless revisions and left dozens of narrative threads and characterizations
unreconciled—and in fact left the novel with numerous gaps of lost time within itself. Proust
came amazingly close to completion, however, and it’s only in the last volume, Time
Regained, when the inconsistencies start to pile up their tiny bits of
rubble. What’s truly amazing about this final volume is that it’s so
brilliantly constructed and lit by such astonishing stained-glass illuminations
that it nevertheless makes the thrust of the full work attain not just to the
nearly perfect Chartres, but to a fully completed Beauvais. I’ve often thought
of Dante’s Comedy as the literary equivalent of Chartres because of its minutely articulated organization of parts and subparts distributed throughout its sublime rose structure (see Erwin
Panofsky’s excellent Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism for a
penetrating discussion of the summa aesthetic in Gothic architecture), but
perhaps the greatest literary cathedral isn’t the one that ends in perfectly balanced cosmic movement with “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars,” but the
one that, like our own irreconcilable universe, leaves us continuously In
Search of Lost Time.

Friday, October 3, 2008

The Long and Woven Road:

Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Sheep

The interweaving
threads of literature, art, history, politics, commerce, and chance form a
dazzling and labyrinthine tapestry filled with an amazing array of figures and
narrative strands. In studying the Renaissance, one of the most fascinating
realizations is that the creative literature in Italy didn’t come anywhere near
the high peak that its visual arts reached during the “High Renaissance”—let’s
give it an arbitrary summit date of 1504, the year Michelangelo dismantled the
tiny womblike shack that he’d been laboring in for four years and presented his
David to the world. Most of the great Italian writers of the time were
the philosophers, historians, and political theorists who along with the great
visual artists were rediscovering the marvels of ancient Rome and Greece, and
in fact none of these writers can really be called “great” at all when compared
to the Italian writers of the late Middle Ages who circled around and trailed
Dante.

Conversely, the English Renaissance
came to a peak about a hundred years later with Edmund Spenser, Christopher
Marlowe, and the dizzying William Shakespeare and for some reason didn’t have a
corresponding summit in the visual arts. It’s fairly easy to isolate the
literary connection between Dante (& co.) and Shakespeare (& co.): The
link is Geoffrey Chaucer, who seems to have absconded with Florence’s literary
fire and taken it back with him to London. But in studying who influenced whom,
the threads of circumstance reveal themselves to be as dizzying as the peaks
that they connect.

The Triumph of Fame, from a set ofThe Triumphs of Petrarch (1502–4), Flemish(probably Brussels), wool and silk tapestry

Great artists almost always arise in
centers of economic wealth and power, and the wealth of medieval and
renaissance Florence came from its woolworking methods, which were the finest
in Europe. Once the Florentines carded the wool, they exported it north to
cities in Flanders, where it was used to make tapestries, which were some of
the most exquisite and in-demand decorative works in the Western world. The
catch was that although the Florentines had developed the best woolworking
techniques (and networks) of the time, the sheep in Italy produced coarse wool,
and so wool had to be imported from England, whose sheep have always been one
of their most famous resources. Thus complex and fluctuating trading alliances
and treaties connected these three areas to each other and to all of Europe.

Enter
Geoffrey Chaucer. A budding young poet and a favorite of the English court,
Chaucer became a diplomat and was granted many offices, including “Comptroller
of the Custody and Subsidy of Wools, Skins, and Tanned Hides.” He was granted
this office directly after a two-year diplomatic mission to Italy (1372–3),
where he negotiated many of the political and economic alliances that bonded
London to Genoa, Pisa, and Florence. As an insatiably curious man of about
thirty, Chaucer marveled at medieval Italy and delved deeply into the
literature of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, perhaps even befriending the
latter two in Florence. Returning to England, his poetry shifted from his
earlier French influences to a distinctly Italian-influenced style. While still
in service of the court, he wrote many works that were considered to be
masterpieces, particularly Troilus and Criseyde, but while on temporary
leave (1386) and then in full retirement (1391 until his death in 1400), he
worked on what became his true masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales.

An illuminated manuscript of The Canterbury Tales,c. 1410, featuring a portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer

Deeply
influenced by the storytelling structure and bawdy nature of Boccaccio’s Decameron,
which was patterned both on Dante’s Comedy and Apuleius’ second-century
Latin novel The Golden Ass (properly, The Metamorphoses), Chaucer
infused the Italian influence with a wit and liveliness and vivacity of
characterization whose depth of field was simply astounding. Having probably met Petrarch, he would have been familiar with Italy’s
nascent interest in ancient literature, which had been brought about in part
because the scholars of Constantinople had fled the invading Turks and taken
their books to Italy, which hadn’t known Greek for a millennium and was eager
to rediscover the wonders that had been lost to them for so long. Even Dante
(who died in 1321) had never read Homer or Sophocles, and although Chaucer was
never able to match Dante’s staggering greatness, his devilishly witty
observations of human nature and his rich interplay of characters was unlike
anything that even the ancients had produced.

He
never finished his masterpiece, but after his death the fragmentary
Canterbury Tales foisted Chaucer to a poetic status that England had never
known. He became London’s state and world poet, as Homer had been for the
Greeks, Vergil had been for Rome, and Dante was for Florence and then for all of
Italy (and arguably for all of continental Europe). He was buried in a corner of
Westminster Abbey in what has come to be known as Poet’s Corner, with him as
“first poet,” and he remained first poet of England until, by some amazing
combination of historical vicissitudes, intellectual influences, pure chance,
and pure genius, a tanner’s son named William Shakespeare came along and filled
his Globe theater with a world never seen before or since.

Detail from The Joust, from the Valois Tapestriesseries (1560s–1570s), looking suspiciously likeWilliam Shakespeare

In
part, it was Chaucer himself who gave birth to the English Renaissance that
produced Shakespeare, but there were many other midwives along the way. The
Humanists of the Northern Renaissance, particularly Erasmus and Sir Thomas
More, helped bring Greek thought to England, lifting the milieu that
Shakespeare was born into just a little bit higher out of the Middle Ages. Then
with Shakespeare’s stage thrusting him up to a peak that was surrounded by
paths as elaborately woven as any tapestry made from English wool, the entire terrestrial globe was lifted even higher. What’s perhaps even more fascinating, though, is
that these paths keep weaving themselves and never end. It’s only been 400
years since Shakespeare, and it’s possible that even greater peaks lay ahead.